1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to providing context sensitive help in a user interface and more particularly to providing cross-environment support for context-sensitive help files.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many computer programs include dedicated help facilities that provide end-users with on-screen information which relates to the operation of the computer program. In most cases, these dedicated help facilities are inseparably associated with the specific computer program. For many years, dedicated help facilities related to the operation of an associated computer program in a single context. Specifically, regardless of the state of operation of the computer program, an end-user's request for on-line help resulted in the presentation of the same help information, typically in the form of a help index. Providing help in a single context, however, compels the end-user to navigate one or more help indices in an attempt to locate a pertinent help file. Of course, in many cases it is not clear to an end-user how to locate the necessary help.
In response to the clear deficiencies of fixed context help, in recent years context-sensitive help has become available in many computer programs. In a help system which can provide context-sensitive help, the help system can detect the current state of a computer program when an end-user requests help. Upon such a help request, the help system can select a suitable help file or portion of a help file which relates specifically to the current state of the computer program. In this way, the help system can provide pertinent help on-demand, without first requiring the end-user to navigate a series of indices to locate a relevant help file.
Despite the clear advantages of providing context-sensitive help with conventional computer programs, heretofore these same advantages have not been fully realized in many types of network distributable applications. Examples of such network distributable applications include those applications implemented through the structured distribution of Web pages and other types of markup. In particular, Web pages can include not only static content, but also dynamic content in the case of “active” pages like Java Server Pages. Other such network distributable applications include Java applications.
As one skilled in the art will recognize, network-deployed applications ought to provide context-sensitive and panel-level help files for use in not only a single environment, but also across multiple environments, multiple languages and multiple, differing end-user skill levels. Among these multiple environments, the same help system might support not only an installed Java application, but also Web-served hypertext markup language (HTML) applications. Typically, help systems which support individual environments store context-sensitive help files in an archive which can be extracted upon demand in the particular environment. Yet, in other cases, the context-sensitive help files can be stored individually as other types of files in the file system of the individual environment.
In any event, the files and resources associated with an application's help system ought to be accessible to an end-user without always requiring the extraction of the pertinent help files from an archive. This particularly can be the case where such help files are stored in a file system during the development phase of a computer application, but are stored in an archive upon deploying the computer application. Accordingly, there has arisen a need for cross-environment context-sensitive help files which can function regardless of the environment in which a corresponding application has been deployed.